Politics (from Greek: πολιτικός politikos, meaning "of, for, or relating to citizens") is the practice and theory of influencing other people on a global, civic or individual level. More narrowly, it refers to achieving and exercising positions of governance — organized control over a human community, particularly a state or civilization. Furthermore, politics is the study or practice of the distribution of power and resources within a given community (a hierarchically organized population) as well as the interrelationship(s) between communities and states.

The shifty language of politics,... that strange language full of Maya and falsities of self-illusion and deliberate delusion of others, which almost immediately turns all true and vivid phrases into a jargon, so that men may fight in a cloud of words without any clear sense of the thing they are battling for....

Politics is not a science, as the professors are apt to suppose. It is an art.

Expression in the Reichstag (1884), as quoted in The Quote Verifier : Who Said What, Where, and When (2006) by Ralph Keyes.

Die Politik ist die Lehre vom Möglichen.

Politics is the art of the possible.

Otto von Bismarck, remark to Meyer von Waldeck, 11 August 1867. Quoted in Heinz Amelung, Bismarck-Worte, 1918; as reported in The Yale Book of Quotations, Yale University Press, 2006. This is widely attributed to Bismarck but there is no firsthand account of his exact words, as discussed in Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier, Macmillan, 2006.

Have you ever seen a candidate talking to a rich person on television?

Attributed to Simon Cameron by Allen Johnson, Chronicles of America Series, Yale University Press, 1918. (Cameron was forced to resign as United States Secretary of War in 1862, due to allegations of corruption).

The pendulum will swing back.

Joseph Gurney Cannon, maxim indicating that in life and politics the things detested today may be praised tomorrow. Quoted in a tribute to Cannon on his retirement, The Sun, Baltimore, Maryland, March 4, 1923.—Congressional Record, March 4, 1923, vol. 64, p. 5714. "Uncle Joe" Cannon, who was Speaker of the House 1903–1911, served in the House for 46 years.

Politics and Religion are obsolete. The time has come for Science and Spirituality.

Often quoted by Arthur C. Clarke as one of his favorite remarks of Jawaharlal Nehru, though some of his earliest citations of it, in Voices from the Sky : Previews of the Coming Space Age (1967), p. 154 indicate that Nehru may himself been either quoting or paraphrasing a statement of Vinoba Bhave.

This quote has been credited to multiple sources, including Mark Twain, José Maria de Eça de Queiroz (translated from Portuguese), and "unknown, originated around 1992" (see The Quote Investigator entry "Politicians Are Like Diapers. They Should Be Changed Regularly" and The Big Apple, Entry from December 12, 2009: “Politicians and diapers should both be changed regularly, and for the same reason”). It may have originated in a Readers Digest joke column. A columnist for the Indiana Gazette quotes a version of this (February 17, 1987) that he says he got from someone who got it from a "Readers Digest fan."

The true destiny of America is religious, not political: it is spiritual, not physical.

That is simple, my friend. It is because Politics is more difficult than physics.

Albert Einstein when asked "Dr. Einstein, why is it that when the mind of man has stretched so far as to discover the structure of the atom we have been unable to devise the political means to keep the atom from destroying us?” a conferee at a meeting at Princeton, N.J. (Jan 1946), as recalled by Greenville Clark in "Letters to the Times" in New York Times (22 Apr 1955), 24.

Researcher: In almost every country there are people trying to seize political power! What is the easy way?

Graphic novelist: Well…I guess by identifying a felt threat to the people and leading a defense! So you pick a group of people who are vulnerable and could seem to be a threat!

Ibid, p. 115.

Whether or not our position fairly can be charged as “apolitical” depends entirely upon how one defines “political.” If “political” be taken in the narrow sense, as signifying those means and methods the world regularly accepts as normative for its doing of politics, then the position of me and mine clearly and is that of apoliticism. If, however, “political” be understood in the broad, etymological sense, as identifying whatever actions have public effect upon the life of the “city” (polis), then there are no grounds for accusing either “me” or any of “mine” of advocating apoliticism.

I say that politics is the most important of the civil activities and has its own field of action, which is not that of religion. Political institutions are secular by definition and operate in independent spheres. All my predecessors have said the same thing, for many years at least, albeit with different accents. I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I'm here.

Life isn’t binary — and neither is politics. If you are adrift in the ocean, your enemy isn’t just sharks; it’s thirst, hunger, drowning, and despair itself. If you face your predicament assuming the only thing you have to worry about is being eaten by a shark, you might fend off the sharks, but you will also probably die. Indeed, by ignoring other threats, you’d probably make yourself more vulnerable to a shark attack.

We will stand by our friends and administer a stinging rebuke to men or parties who are either indifferent, negligent, or hostile, and, wherever opportunity affords, to secure the election of intelligent, honest, earnest trade unionists, with clear, unblemished, paid-up union cards in their possession.

Samuel Gompers, "Men of Labor! Be Up and Doing" (editorial), American Federationist (May 1906)

They [governments] talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the fools and the suckers.

I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. "I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs." "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking." "Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!"

Despite the intentions of human politics, history has shown that it is often the one, not the many, who have led the world towards its destiny... now turn your eyes to Earth once more and tell me what you see.

Politics is about being able to do things that your colleagues couldn't do, and for them to recognize that. What marks out successful leaders from the unsuccessful is their decisiveness, courage and clarity - a strategic vision.

As far I'm concerned, the two poles of politics were not Left Wing or Right Wing. In fact they're just two ways of ordering an industrial society and we're fast moving beyond the industrial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries.

There's an increasing sense in our political life that in both parties politicians call themselves public servants but act like bosses who think that voters work for them. Physicians who routinely help the needy and the uninsured do not call themselves servants. They get to be called the 1%. Politicians who jerk around doctors, nurses and health systems call themselves servants, when of course they look more like little kings and queens instructing the grudging peasants in how to arrange their affairs.

I think it’s great that we (in the USA) have multiple female presidential candidates, so there’s not the woman running... I’m very excited about there being multiple women across — that can represent different parts of the political spectrum on the left, so that’s something that I’m thankful for... what we’re trying to do is is frame the debate and the conversation... that we’re going to be having in the next two years...

When citizens are relatively equal, politics has tended to be fairly democratic. When a few individuals hold enormous amounts of wealth, democracy suffers. The reason for this pattern is simple. Through campaign contributions, lobbying, influence over public discourse, and other means, wealth can be translated into political power. When wealth is highly concentrated—that is, when a few individuals have enormous amounts of money—political power tends to be highly concentrated, too. The wealthy few tend to rule. Average citizens lose political power. Democracy declines.

Perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it and seeing it, to found one in himself. But whether it exists anywhere or ever exists is no matter; for this is the only commonwealth in whose politics he can ever take part.

The politics of the unpolitical—these are the politics of those who desire to be pure in heart: the politics of men without personal ambition; of those who have not desires wealth or an unequal share of worldly possessions; of those who have always striven, whatever their race or condition, for human values and not for national or sectional interests.

For our Western world, Christ is the supreme example of this unselfish devotion to the good of humanity, and the Sermon on the Mount is the source of all the politics of the unpolitical.

In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

Carl Sagan (1987) Keynote address at CSICOP conference, as quoted in Do Science and the Bible Conflict? (2003) by Judson Poling, p. 30.

Political systems are self-destructive constructs. They possess a de-evolutionary or cannibalizing nature, locked firmly within closed-ended structures, micromanaged from top tiers, and endowed with an overwhelming capacity to crank out external controls in assembly-line fashion. With clockwork precision, these systems manufacture rules and a legal apparatus which in turn erect artificial barriers to prevent the optimizing processes of evolution and information fluidity.

I was dealing with a political story where much of the action took place on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and one of the edicts that came down from the Mt. Sinai of advertisers row was that at no time in a political drama must a speech or a character be equated with an existing political party or current political problems. So several million viewers were treated to an incredible display of senators shouting, gesticulating and talking in hieroglyphics, saying not a single thing germane to the current political scene.

Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves,—sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but States, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence.

The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and strong passions from the pursuit of power; and it frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortunes of the state until he has shown himself incompetent to conduct his own.

The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer.

Throned above all, in a manner without parallel in all past, is the veiled prophet of finance, swaying all men living by a sort of magic, and delivering oracles in a language not understood of the people.

Take the so-called politics of fear — the constant reference to risks, from hoodies on the street corner to international terrorism. Whatever the truth of these risks and the best ways of dealing with them, the politics of fear plays on an assumption that people cannot bear the uncertainties associated with them. Politics then becomes a question of who can better deliver an illusion of control.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.

I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.

Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontent. Phrase used in letter by Earl of Shelburne (July 11, 1765), before Burke's use of it.

Away with the cant of "Measures, not men!"—the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.

Of the various executive abilities, no one excited more anxious concern than that of placing the interests of our fellow-citizens in the hands of honest men, with understanding sufficient for their stations. No duty is at the same time more difficult to fulfil. The knowledge of character possessed by a single individual is of necessity limited. To seek out the best through the whole Union, we must resort to the information which from the best of men, acting disinterestedly and with the purest motives, is sometimes incorrect.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elias Shipman and Merchants of New Haven (July 12, 1801). Paraphrased as "Put the right man in the right place" by John Bach McMaster, History of the People of the United States Volume II, p. 586.

Skilled to pull wires he baffles nature's hope, who sure intended him to stretch a rope.

A weapon that comes down as stillAs snowflakes fall upon the sod;But executes a freeman's will,As lightning does the will of God;And from its force, nor doors nor locksCan shield you; 'tis the ballot-box.

Pythagoras. Advice against political voting, which was done by means of beans. See Lucian Gallus, IV. 5. Vitarum Auctio. Sect. 6. The superstition against beans was prevalent in Egypt however. See Herodotus, II. 37, also Sextus Empiricus. Explanations to abstain from beans from lost treatise of Aristotle in Diog. Laertes, VIII. 34. Beans had an oligarchical character on account of their use in voting. Plutarch gives a similar explanation in De Educat, Chapter XVII. Caution against entering public life, for the votes by which magistrates were elected were originally given by beans. Pythagoras referred to by Jeremy Taylor—Holy Living. Section IV, p. 80.

Get thee glass eyes;And, like a scurvy politician, seemTo see the things thou dost not.

Quotes reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 196-198.

There may be cases in which there is so much of difficulty in knowing where the law stands that we take time to consider, and sometimes doubt much and sometimes differ among ourselves. But I believe every one of the Judges acts upon the principle that he is before man and God in the discharge of his duty, and acts upon his solemn oath, and declares tbe law not according to any political fancy, or for the purposes of serving one party or serving another, but according to the pure conviction of his own mind without looking to any party.

It cannot but occur to every person's observation, that as long as parties exist in the country (and perhaps it is for the good of the country that parties should exist to a certain degree, because they keep ministers on their guard in their conduct), they will have their friends and adherents. A great political character, who held a high situation in this country some years ago, but who is now dead, used to say that ministers were the better for being now and then a little peppered and salted. And while these parties exist, they will have their friendships and attainments, which will sometimes dispose them to wander from argument to declamation.

Men argue differently, from natural phenomena and political appearances: they have different capacities, different degrees of knowledge, and different intelligence. But the means of information and judging are open to both: each professes to act from his own skill and sagacity; and, therefore, neither needs to communicate to the other.

The Constitution does not allow reasons of State to influence our judgments: God forbid it should! We must not regard political consequences, how formidable soever they might be: if rebellion was the certain consequence, we are bound to say, "Fiat justitia mat caelum." The Constitution trusts the King with reasons of State and policy; he may stop prosecutions,1 he may pardon offences2; it is his, to judgewhetherthelaworthecriminalshould yield. We have no election.

All political power is primarily an illusion…. Illusion. Mirrors and blue smoke, beautiful blue smoke rolling over the surface of highly polished mirrors, first a thin veil of blue smoke, then a thick cloud that suddenly dissolves into wisps of blue smoke, the mirrors catching it all, bouncing it back and forth.

Jimmy Breslin How the Good Guys Finally Won, Notes from an Impeachment Summer, p. 33–34 (1975). The phrase is usually quoted as "blue smoke and mirrors".

A political career brings out the basest qualities in human nature.

James Bryce; in Owen Wister, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, p. 66 (1930). This remark was made during a conversation with Wister in London in 1921.

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume.

Edmund Burke, "Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790", The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, vol. 3, p. 246 (1899).

Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, address recorded for the Republican Lincoln Day dinners, January 28, 1954. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954, p. 219.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H. L. Mencken, "Women as Outlaws", A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 29 (1949). This essay was first published in The Smart Set, December 1921.

The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.

Reinhold Niebuhr. This statement is attributed to him in his obituary in The New York Times, June 2, 1971, p. 45. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view, something which leaves off as soon as that end is reached. It is not a public chore, to be got over with. It is a way of life. It is the life of a domesticated political and social creature who is born with a love for public life, with a desire for honor, with a feeling for his fellows; and it lasts as long as need be.

Attributed to Plutarch in The Great Quotations, ed. George Seldes, p. 570 (1966). Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, remarks to Harvard and Yale undergraduates invited to Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, Long Island, June 1901.—Hermann Hagedorn, The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill, p. 112 (1954).

Politics is the practical exercise of the art of self-government, and somebody must attend to it if we are to have self-government; somebody must study it, and learn the art, and exercise patience and sympathy and skill to bring the multitude of opinions and wishes of self-governing people into such order that some prevailing opinion may be expressed and peaceably accepted. Otherwise, confusion will result either in dictatorship or anarchy. The principal ground of reproach against any American citizen should be that he is not a politician. Everyone ought to be, as Lincoln was.

Elihu Root, "Lincoln as a Leader of Men", Men and Policies, Addresses by Elihu Root, ed. Robert Bacon and James B. Scott, p. 75 (1924).

Who put up that cage?Who hung it up with bars, doors?Why do those on the inside want to get out?Why do those outside want to get in?What is this crying inside and out all the time?What is this endless, useless beating of baffled wings at these bars, doors, this cage?

The political activity prevailing in the United States is something one could never understand unless one had seen it. No sooner do you set foot on American soil than you find yourself in a sort of tumult; a confused clamor rises on every side, and a thousand voices are heard at once, each expressing some social requirements. All around you everything is on the move: here the people of a district are assembled to discuss the possibility of building a church; there they are busy choosing a representative; further on, the delegates of a district are hurrying to town to consult about some local improvements; elsewhere it's the village farmers who have left their furrows to discuss the plan for a road or a school.

Until you've been in politicsyou've never really been aliveit's rough and sometimes it'sdirty and it's always hardwork and tedious detailsBut, it's the only sport for grownups—all othergames are for kids.—Heinlein